Archive
Friends,
below are some great events coming up at the Book Smith at 1644 Haight St. between Clayton & Cole (863-8688)
Friday, January 13
8:00 PM
LITERARY CLOWN FOOLERY
This New Year, we want to celebrate local authors. (And, hopefully, make them laugh!) For January's installation of clownfoolery, our very own literary cabaret players will create skits around Cat Versus Human, by Oakland-based cartoonist Yasmine Surovec, as well asOutrageous Openness: Letting the Divine Take the Lead, by SF Examiner writer Tosha Silver.
Come celebrate the Bay Area's literary and creative (and divine!) tradition through laughter. We promise you've never been to a literary event like this before....
The fun starts at 8! Tickets $10, in the store and online at Brown Paper Tickets. .Tuesday, January 17
7:30 PM
LEIGH STEIN
THE FALLBACK PLAN
Estimated percentage of the U.S. college class of 2011 who are moving back home after graduation: 85 (Harper’s Index, August 2011)
When you’re young you have a plan -- a scheme, a hope, a notion, a dream -- for what adulthood will be. Reality, however, loves to disappoint. Sooner or later everyone has to ask: “Okay, so what’s my fallback plan?”
THE FALLBACK PLAN by former New Yorker staffer Leigh Stein is a dazzlingly funny and heartbreaking debut novel about that bittersweet moment in-between youth and adulthood when childhood fantasies morph into something strange and new. Fresh out of college, with no job materializing from her drama degree, Esther Kohler moves home to live with her parents in the suburbs. When her dad starts charging her rent, she’s forced to take a job babysitting for a young couple whose second child has recently died. Esther soon finds herself playing many roles within the troubled family—confidante, friend, mistress, mother, therapist—and facing some untidy truths about adult life.
Leigh Stein’s prose is a pure delight. Like a Lorrie Moore for the Facebook generation, or Miranda July’s wiseass kid sister, Stein shifts effortlessly between pop-culture comedy, dead-on dialogue, and wry psychological insight. Beneath the playful riffs on The Sound of Music, suburban Judaism, Guitar Hero, and The Chronicles of Narnia is a writer with a profound understanding of what makes people tick.
Wednesday, January 18
7:30 PM
KESHNI KASHYAP
TINA’S MOUTH: An Existential Comic Diary
From filmmaker Keshni Kashyap comes the story of a high school heroine --funny, wise, and reminiscent of Persepolis’s Marjane Satrapi -- negotiating an existentially trying spring semester at her Southern California prep school.
Sophomore Tina Malhotra is a wry and endearing observer of the cliques and mores of Yarborough Academy and the foibles of her Southern California intellectual Indian family. After an English honors class assignment to keep an existential diary, she's on a first-name basis with Jean-Paul Sartre. She looks to the great philosopher for help when Alex, her best friend and longtime smart-girl ally, dumps her for a new group -- with whom, per Tina, "Alex could discuss slutty clothes and cheesey poetry."
Weekdays eating lunch alone on her Bench of Existential Solitude and a little nudge from her hippie teacher drive her to make decisions that will change the course of her semester…and lead her to her first “technical” and real kisses.
Kashyap's smart and funny graphic novel illustrates the tricky world of high school while wrestling with those bigger questions. In TINA’S MOUTH, our heroine contemplates her place in the world, what a heavenly and mysterious expanse might be, and what it all means on her path to enlightenment -- all before the spring formal.
Keshni Kashyap is a filmmaker whose five short films have been screened in more than forty festivals around the world. She contributes to The Daily Beast. She lives in New York City.
Illustrator Mari Araki, an artist and storyteller, lives in Los Angeles.
Thursday, January 19
7:30 PM
WILLIAM GIBSON
DISTRUST THAT PARTICULAR FLAVOR
William Gibson is known primarily as a novelist, from his ground-breaking first novel, Neuromancer, which was published in 1984 and was credited with having described the internet and cyberspace before any such things existed, to his more recent contemporary bestsellers Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History. During those nearly thirty years, though, Gibson has been sought out by wildly varying publications, from major magazines to more obscure and out-of-print sources, for his insights into contemporary culture on everything from the future of technology to the work of George Orwell, from compulsive online watch collecting to drug trafficking in Singapore.
Gibson has always had the keen ability to spot our technological and cultural trajectory in both his fiction and nonfiction and DISTRUST THAT PARTICULAR FLAVOR grants readers a privileged view into the mind of the writer whose thinking has shaped not only a generation of writers, but our entire culture. This first collection of Gibson’s nonfiction includes an introduction by the author and essays and articles published over the course of 30 years. Taken together, these pieces offer perspective into the ideas that fuel his novels: futurity, technology, history, connectivity.
Gibson riffs on the ways our lives are “soundtracked” by the music and culture around us for Rolling Stone; he weighs in on the internet for the New York Times Magazine; and describes the wonders of Tokyo for Wired. One of his major pieces, “Disneyland with the Death Penalty,” a controversial article about Singapore, resulted in Wired being banned from that country and incited a strong critical response. Throughout this volume, Gibson shows himself at the forefront of our rapidly transforming, endlessly beguiling culture, and immerses himself in the ideas, themes, and obsessions at the heart of his novels.
DISTRUST THAT PARTICULAR FLAVOR is the central pillar to the body of work of “one of the most astute and engaging commentators on our astonishing, chaotic present” (The Washington Post Book World).
William Gibson is the author of ten previous books. His 1984 debut novel, Neuromancer, was the first novel to win the three top science fiction prizes—the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award. He is also a co-author of the novel The Difference Engine, written with Bruce Sterling. Originally from South Carolina, Gibson lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his family.
We’re incredibly pleased to host him once again.
Reserved seats are available with the purchase of Distrust That Particular Flavor from The Booksmith, in advance by request or from January 3 in the store. Please phone (415-863-8688), email (orders@booksmith.com), or place your order online (www.booksmith.com). Reserved seats available while supplies last.
A Literary Double-Header:
Monday, January 23
7:30 PM
BEN EHRENREICH
ETHER
and
ROBERT ARELLANO
CURSE THE NAMES
Ben Ehrenreich is an award-winning journalist and fiction writer. His fiction has been published in McSweeney's, Bomb, and Black Clock, among other publications. His previous novel, The Suitors, received widespread critical attention. ETHER is his second novel.
A bearded man in a badly soiled suit known only as The Stranger wanders into an apocalyptic landscape on the fringes of a dying metropolis, looking for a way to "get back on top." Thwarted and rejected at every turn by old friends and strangers alike--even by the author of this novel, whom he visits repeatedly in unsuccessful attempts to determine his own narrative--his impotence and rage are expressed in acts of seemingly senseless violence. The various characters he encounters on his journey--a pack of sadistic boys, skinheads who beat him senseless, a deaf-mute woman who tries to heal him, a sidewalk preacher and a deranged man who identify him as The One--avoid him or abuse him, or attempt to follow him.
Entertaining, disturbing and wildly intelligent, written with sinister humor and great compassion, ETHER reflects on the possibilities and consequences of forgiveness, the problems of faith and the trials of creation.
"A compact work of biblical noir...like Bambi directed by Quentin Tarantino....In Ether God is one of us: fickle, self-obsessed, senselessly malicious....Drink in Ehrenreich's sculpted sentences ... language for the weary and the dispossessed, the rich or the poor. Have a seat; stay awhile." -- Los Angeles Times
Robert Arellano is the author of the Edgar-nominated noir Havana Lunar and two earlier novels. Writing as Eddy Arellano, he collaborated with three artists on the graphic novel Dead in Desemboque, and as Bobby Rabyd he created the Web’s first interactive novel, Sunshine ’69. He teaches in the College of Arts & Sciences at Southern Oregon University. CURSE THE NAMES is his newest work.
High on a mesa in the mountains of New Mexico, a small town hides a dreadful secret. On a morning very soon there will be an accident that triggers a terrible chain reaction, and the world we know will be wiped out. James Oberhelm, a reporter at Los Alamos National Laboratory, already sees the devastation,
like the skin torn off a moment that is yet to be. He believes he can prevent an apocalypse, but first James must escape the devices of a sensuous young blood tech, a lecherous old hippie, a predator in a waking nightmare, and a forsaken adobe house high away in the Sangre de Cristo mountains whose dark history entwines them all.
A massive bomb is ticking beneath the sands of the Southwest, and time is running out to send a warning…
“In this unsettling mix of noir and paranormal obsession . . . Arellano displays a sly, Hitchcockian touch.” -- Publishers Weekly
Tuesday, January 24
7:30 PM
GREIL MARCUS
THE DOORS: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years
“Nobody reads a song like Greil Marcus, whose prose is as passionate and omnivorous as the music he loves. Here he travels by way of Thomas Pynchon, Pop Art and Charles Manson to bring the chaotic, majestic, death-haunted Doors back to doomed and haunting life.” -- Salman Rushdie
“No one thinks or writes like Greil Marcus. He has a genius for putting the aural dream-language of music into words, for making you ‘hear’ songs you thought you knew as if for the first time. Not just hear, but, as he puts it, ‘feel on your skin’ well after the song is over. Because ‘the story it’s telling is still going on.’” -- Mary Gaitskill
The Doors: a lasting voice or psychedelic trash?
To Greil Marcus they can be both—in the same song.
More Doors songs can be heard on the radio today, forty years after Jim Morrison’s death, than those of almost any group of their era. Sparked by that fact, and with the deep-focus intensity of a critic absolutely engaged with his subject, Greil Marcus both revisits a parade of great performances—L.A. Woman, Roadhouse Blues, Light My Fire, When the Music’s Over, End of the Night and more—and explores why and how the Doors have endured with their spirit and menace intact. In a masterful essay that takes Oliver Stone’s excoriated 1991 film The Doors as its springboard, Marcus makes plain that the Doors are at the heart of what Leslie Fiedler called “the mythic life of the their generation.” In “Twentieth Century Fox” and their version of “Gloria,” Marcus follows the band on its giddy swerve between pop art and pornography. To Marcus, the Doors’ ghostly compulsion today is as powerful as when they first emerged in Los Angeles in 1966. He dramatizes how their music still shimmers with the dread that in their time hovered over a country convulsed by assassination and war—and, with its own darkness, over a city terrorized by the specter of the Manson murders—a dread that, in different forms, with different faces, is with us still.
There have been many books on the Doors, but Marcus is the first to look past their mystique and the death cult of both Jim Morrison and the era he was made to personify to focus solely on the music.
Greil Marcus is the author of When That Rough God Goes Riding, Like a Rolling Stone, The Old, Weird America, The Shape of Things to Come, Mystery Train, Dead Elvis, In the Fascist Bathroom, and other books. With Werner Sollors, he is the editor of A New Literary History of America. Since 2000, he has taught at Princeton, Berkeley, Minnesota, and the New School in New York; his column “Real Life Rock Top 10” appears regularly in The Believer.